MSC at CCFW, Spring 2023

Week 4: May 10, 2023

“Discovering Your Compassionate Voice”

Home practices:

  • Lovingkindness for ourselves

Stages of Progress

We are now in the "muddy middle" of the program. If you are finding that you have doubts about your ability to become more self-compassionate, know that that's not a problem. In fact, it may mean you are making progress!

Self-compassion training typically goes through three stages:

  • Striving

  • Disillusionment

  • Radical Acceptance

Progress is the refinement of intention—learning to practice self-compassion for its own sake, not as an effort to manipulate moment-to-moment experience. “Progress” really means dropping the idea of progress. The refinement of intention is best expressed in the paradoxical statement: “We give ourselves kindness not to feel better, but because we feel bad.”

Striving

We all start to practice self-compassion, or any self-improvement effort, with the intention to feel better. It is full of hope. Sometimes the practice bears fruit right away; for example, when we discover for the first time, “I can love myself!” This realization can be quite elevating, like the infatuation phase of a romantic relationship.

Disillusionment

Of course, as in any romantic relationship, infatuation is usually followed by disillusionment. In interpersonal relationships, disillusionment is the discovery that our beloved is no longer the answer to all our problems and is, after all, a human being. In self-compassion practice, disillusionment corresponds to the discovery that “I am still the same person as before!” with the same uncomfortable feelings and personal flaws. When this happens, we might blame ourselves or the training program for failing to make a more substantive change. The problem usually lies in the intention behind the practices—the wish to change our personalities or how we feel rather than accepting “what is” with an open heart.  Self-compassion has been hijacked in the service of resistance. The fault is not in the techniques but in the intention behind their use.

Consider the following example of using loving-kindness phrases to overcome insomnia. When we first learn loving-kindness and have a curious, beginner’s mind, we may successfully comfort ourselves with the phrases when we’re lying sleepless in the middle of the night and easily drift off to sleep. Upon waking in the morning, we may be excited by this success and decide to use loving-kindness phrases the next night to fall asleep. Predictably, it doesn’t work because the intention behind using the phrases has changed from self-comfort to a slick, new strategy for resisting or avoiding suffering. That’s when we become disillusioned. 

Meditation teacher Bob Sharples (2003) describes these efforts as the “subtle aggression of self-improvement” and, as an antidote, he recommends that we “practice meditation as an act of love.”  Disillusionment is an important phase of self-compassion training because it lays bare our counterproductive striving.

Radical Acceptance

Radical acceptance is the last stage (Brach, 2003). Radical acceptance refers to “fully entering into and embracing whatever is in the present moment” (Robins, Schmidt & Linehan, 2004, p.40), which also means embracing ourselves and others just as we are. How do we progress toward radical acceptance? Mostly we do less. In radical acceptance, we are not throwing compassion at ourselves to make our pain go away, or accepting the status quo in our personal, community, or social context.  Instead, we are opening to the pain as it arises, with self-compassion. Some sayings that may reduce unnecessary striving are:

“The point of spiritual practice isn’t to perfect yourself, but to perfect your love.” (Kornfield, 2017)

“We are not here to learn self-compassion—we are here to embrace our imperfections!”

“I’m not okay, you’re not okay…but that’s okay!” 

To repeat an earlier analogy, radical acceptance is like a parent comforting a child with the flu. The parent is not trying to drive out the flu with their kindness—they give care and comfort as a spontaneous response to the child’s suffering until the illness passes on its own. All human beings suffer in life. Can we offer ourselves the same kindness and affection as we might extend to a child with the flu? And can we offer compassion to our "imperfect self," our "failed self," or our "shameful self?"  When we can, that’s radical acceptance.

Some additional quotations that teachers can use to illustrate the meaning of radical acceptance are:

“…we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is…not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.” (Chödrön, 1991/2001, p. 4)

“A person should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them.” (Freud, in Jones, 1955, p. 188)

“The curious paradox of life is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change” (Rogers, 1961/1995, p. 17)

“The goal of practice is to become a compassionate mess.” (Nairn, 2009). To be a compassionate mess means to be fully human--often struggling, uncertain, confused—with great compassion. This is the invitation of self-compassion.

  • The stages of progress do not always proceed in a linear, sequential manner. For example, when we notice we're in radical acceptance, we instinctively grasp to that state and slip back into striving. When we notice we're in striving or disillusionment, and meet those states with mindfulness and compassion, we move into radical acceptance.

  • No stage is “better” than the other. Our task is not to “progress,” but rather to meet the stage we are in with kindness and compassion.

  • Over years of practice, our periods of striving and disillusionment diminish and radical acceptance increases. The progression is like an upwards spiral.

 

Self-Criticism and Safety

In the Stages of Progress we discussed the importance of radical acceptance, but there's an aspect of ourselves we typically don't want to accept - our inner critic. We tend to see it only as a source of pain, and would like to get rid of it if we could. Therefore, it’s worth getting to know our inner critic a little better.

What function does self-criticism serve? Is there any value in self-criticism? If so, what good may it do? Please explore this topic in the discussion board this week. Note that this discussion is about harsh self-criticism, not critical discernment. The tone of the critical voice makes all the difference, as if there were "metal" in the voice.  

The desire to keep ourselves safe underlies most self-criticism. The self-critic is usually trying to help us in some way, to protect us from some perceived danger, even if the methods it uses are unproductive.

Sometimes a critical inner voice is internalized shame from early caregivers, or from cultural oppression, and has no redeeming value whatsoever.  ("You will never amount to anything," "It's all your fault," "Nobody loves you"). 

When we stand up to abusive voices from the past, or start being kind to ourselves, we may feel frightened and unsafe. It feels like breaking an invisible agreement that helped us survive. This fear can be met with self-compassion as well but we need to proceed slowly and have access to a personal trauma counselor. 

Please note that some people do not seem to have a harsh inner critic. This may be because they don't have one, or perhaps they just have never explored this aspect of their experience and so they cannot recognize critical self-talk. However, the inner critic can also be experienced somatically as a sense of helplessness, despair, or agitation.

Of course, just like the inner critic, our inner compassionate self also wants us to be safe. While providing unconditional self-acceptance, it would like us to change behaviors that are causing us harm. We're going to explore what it feels like to motivate a behavioral change from both a self-critical and self-compassionate perspective.